Keitai

My graphic designer roots are showing Yee olde font house Monotype is partnering with Ikivo (which provides mobile SVG products and players) to release a series of scalable (!) fonts for mobile devices. The ESQ® Mobile series includes 200 fonts and quite a nice selection (PDF) at that.

“Monotype Imaging’s ESQ® Mobile mobile fonts are based on the industry standard TrueType and OpenType font formats and can be licensed by developers, content creators, application providers, mobile publishers, wireless operators and handset manufacturers. Integrated with your application, content, game, service or user interface, ESQ mobile fonts allow you to differentiate your product with something powerfully simple—scalable type that’s distinctive in style.” [via UK Mobile Marketing Magazine)

This is not the first scalable font announcement i’ve heard (and of course embedded desktop/print-designed fonts in Flash Lite do scale—though not always reliably in my experience.) Other announcements have been focused on Asian font sets exclusively. This mobile SVG-specific announcement is particularly interesting as the SVG deployment stats are already quite impressive. The most up to date list of models that are shipping with SVG Tiny 1.1 is pretty big (especially once you take into account the popularity of some of these handsets.)

• Motorola: C975, C980, E770V, E1000, i580, i870, i875, i880, i885, V3X, V975, V980, V1050
• Nokia: 3250, 5500 Sport, 6125, 6126, 6131, 6136, 6151, 6233, 6234, 6265, 6280, 6282, 6288, 7370, 7373, 7390, 7710, 8800 Sirocco Edition, E50, E60, E61, E62, E70, N70, N71, N72, N73, N75, N80, N90, N91, N92, N93, N95
• Panasonic: MX6, MX7, SA6, SA7, VS3, VS7
• Sagem: my-X8, my-V76, my-V85
• Samsung: D600, E350, Z300, Z500, Z560, ZV10, ZV30
• Siemens: C65, C70, C75, CF65, CFX65, CL75, CX65, CX70, CX70 Emoty, CX75, M65, M75, S65, S75, SF65, SL65, SL75, SK65, SP65
• Sony Ericsson: D750, F500, K300, K310, K320, K500, K508, K510, K600, K608, K610, K700, K750, K790, K800, M600, P990, S600, S700, S710, V600, V630, V800, W300, W550, W600, W700, W710, W800, W810, W830, W850, W900, W950, Z500, Z520, Z530, Z550, Z558, Z710, Z800

and there are many more. According to Ikivo, shipments of SVG have to date reached 150 million units and over 150 devices. (PDF)

Depending on the implementation and availability within products and services, scalable fonts could—at the very least—enable accessiblity features, allowing users to adjust fonts for size and legibility within the O/S. On a more personal level however, fonts as fashion/lifestyle may finally become available to the mobile realm as they already are in print and digital.

“Now that text-writing has become digital, design-savvy Koreans have paved the way for a growing market for fonts, the style that is used in text design. Revenue for buying fonts to use on blogs is increasing and graphics firms are developing more Korean fonts. Chin Mi-young, a college student in Seoul, uses different fonts to write on her Cyworld Web site, depending on her mood. “I don’t like the conventional-looking fonts, but the ones that look like real handwriting,” she said. “When I’m happy, I want to express myself with a cuter font.”…

Pyun Suk-hoon, head of Yoon Design, one of Korea’s largest commercial typography-developing graphics companies, said that these trends show that fonts are now considered a fashion. “Young people like to express their individuality and their culture visually, which is why they decorate their Web sites with different designs and now, different fonts,”" [via Joong Ang Daily)